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India’s longest-serving prime minister can certainly outperform Jawaharlal Nehru in one respect: using investigative agencies to suppress Opposition leaders and engineer riots against minority communities. Unfortunately for him, the courts are now dismissing such false cases one after another.

Modi’s twelve years as prime minister have left behind a graveyard of false litigations and collapsed court cases. Consider the 2002 Delhi violence, in which over 50 people, mostly Muslims, were massacred. The riots were carefully orchestrated to establish a Gujarat-model permanent vote bank for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). It went on for weeks.

Police filed over 758 cases, mostly against the minorities and opposition-party workers, at the instance of the political bosses. Litigation carried on for years in different courts. Now before the judiciary, those same police cases are collapsing. While acquitting the accused, the courts noted large scale “fabrication” of evidence by police. Some judges have even proposed taking action against the officials responsible for this.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty

The courts have reportedly acquitted the accused/victims in 80% of the 126 cases in which verdicts have been pronounced. In many cases, courts noted that the charges brought by police were similar – like “carbon copies” of each other. The courts have evidently not found substance in the police claim that violence was “pre-planned” as a part of a larger conspiracy to “threaten India’s unity”. The police failure to bring forth credible facts has been noted more than once.

Attacks on free press

A similar route has been taken in Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s witch hunt of free media. The case of NewsClick would put to shame even hardened spin dictators like Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The police raided the journalists of the news portal and interrogated many of them for days. Many were terrorised and forced to quit.

NewsClick itself was forced to drastically reduce the scale of its operations. Now the court had found that all the charges related to money laundering and economic offences were just a cock-and-bull story. Obviously, the enforcement agencies were under pressure to resort to outright witch-hunting. The court noted that the stories told about it were a “fabricated, highly exaggerated and completely unbelievable tale”.

Judicial strictures highlighting the misuse of power to penalise opponents is certainly a much-needed relief. But is it enough? What is the guarantee that........

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